penrose VS x11rb

writing an X11 window manager is ... extremely tedious. have a look at https://github.com/sminez/penrose .

Hey everyone 👋 ! I'm currently working on a rust library for building and configuring your own shell! It's inspired by projects like xmonad and penrose where the configuration of the program is done in code. This means that for example, instead of using Bash's arcane syntax for configuring the prompt, it can be configured instead using a rust builder pattern! The project itself is still at a very young stage, so there are plenty of bugs and unimplemented features. However, some things that are (partially) implemented are:

https://github.com/sminez/penrose https://sminez.github.io/penrose/

im not sure weather or not i should mention penrose an dwm here :D you can configure even more than with kde (and my setup ended up way beyond anything recognisable)

There are many existing tiling-window managers with i3 probably being the most popular choice for linux systems. These window managers can depend on extensive configuration files or in the case of dwm, git patching or C programming. Penrose takes a different approach in that Penrose is not a window manager. Penrose is a high-level rust library that you use to build your own window manager. This gives us many options for customization while also giving us all the advantages that come with writing rust code.

Mostly non-dynamic except for wm-specific actions. What kind of events are we talking about? I think that if we're talking about something that on a more low-level exposes x11 events penrose is a better bet. That being said, exposing something like:

You might find Penrose interesting. Basically a rust library that you can use to write your own X11 window manager without needing to deal with a lot of the lower level details of X11.

https://github.com/sminez/penrose which I'm really enjoying so far.

xdotool worked ... but I didn't want to depend on external command-line tools, so I decided to look for X11 bindings for Rust. The best library I could find was x11rb. It had very little documentation and almost no one used it (it was difficult to find people who could help me with it). Fortunately, it had a detailed tutorial. Still, it was a struggle to make things works sometimes.

I'm using x11rb, X11 Rust Bindings. I modified some code from this tutorial so that I'm listening to key presses from parent_win (screen.root) rather than win:

In the end, I decided to use x11rb: https://github.com/psychon/x11rb. This way I don't have to run external commands.

I'm trying to move a window (the GNOME terminal) with x11rb. I followed this tutorial. But the move_window function doesn't move the window.

I'm using x11rb to interact with a window created with gtk-rs. window_id is the ID of the window created with gtk-rs. window_id_2 is the ID of the window created with x11rb (for testing purposes).

I also checked x11rb, but I think it's too low level (and too complicated).

There is a comparison page in x11rb but it seems to be outdated w.r.t rust-xcb and the unsafe claims, so would appreciate other perspectives.

Do you have a source for that or any specifics on how it "can't handle" the usecases? There's already work in Rust around fully supporting X11 (for example https://github.com/bread-graphics/breadx or https://github.com/psychon/x11rb)

I was thinking about specializing x11rb which is a great library for interfacing with X11, to my specific single threaded use case.

So if firefox is an application you can find you can query the WM_CLASS property, like this. Other applications might not set that and you'd have to use some other property or information to deduce that this given window(which is just a u32) is actually applicationA. A tip is to start the application, use xprop and see what properties it sets. call_wrapper.rs contains a lot of code about querying different properties. The x11rb example simple_window.rs has a few examples of the other side of that showing how an application can set its on properties.